How the ‘Never Bernie’ voters threw support behind Joe Biden and changed the Democratic primary

By Astead W. Herndon

The New York Times|

Apr 01, 2020 | 2:19 PM

FILE - Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, speaks at a campaign event in Austin, Texas, Feb. 23, 2020. After Sanders won New Hampshire and Nevada, his campaign hit a roadblock: a wide range of Democrats who would do anything to stop him. (Tamir Kalifa/The New York Times)

Jane King, a financial investor from Boston who describes herself as progressive, began the presidential primary as an avowed supporter of Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. But as Warren’s candidacy seemed to fade early this year, King looked elsewhere.

She considered Michael Bloomberg, Warren’s electoral nemesis. She thought about Pete Buttigieg, another moderate. Ultimately, in the Massachusetts primary that was a must-win for Warren, King voted for former Vice President Joe Biden.

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She was simply trying to be strategic, King admits: She was willing to do whatever was necessary to stop Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont from becoming the Democratic nominee.

“I didn’t want Bernie to beat Elizabeth in her own backyard. But then, it became much more complicated than that,” said King, 70. “Are we going to have a nominee who could take on the Republican Party? We have to stop Bernie.”

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Rarely has political momentum flipped as quickly as it did in the first half of March, as Sanders lost serious ground to Biden before the coronavirus slowed their race. There are well-known reasons for the shift: Moderate candidates like Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota rallied around Biden. He enjoyed demographic advantages, particularly with black voters. And turnout among young voters and liberal nonvoters did not surge, failing to reshape the electorate as Sanders had hoped.

But beyond ideology, race and turnout, a chief reason for Biden’s success has little to do with his candidacy. He became a vehicle for Democrats like King who were supporting other candidates but found the prospect of Sanders and his calls for political revolution so distasteful that they put aside misgivings about Biden and backed him instead.

In phone interviews, dozens of Democrats, mostly 50 and older, who live in key March primary states like Massachusetts, Virginia, Michigan and Florida, said that Biden’s appeal went beyond his case for how to beat President Donald Trump. It was his chances of overtaking Sanders, the only candidate in the vast Democratic field they found objectionable for reasons personal and political.

For some, like Amy Siegel of Natick, Massachusetts, the anti-Sanders feeling relates back to the 2016 Democratic primary, when she supported Hillary Clinton and believed Sanders ran a divisive campaign that wounded her before the general election. This time around, Siegel, 57, initially supported Buttigieg. But she voted for Biden in her state’s primary, held on Super Tuesday, days after Buttigieg dropped out and endorsed the former vice president. Siegel said she decided to flip her vote even before Buttigieg exited the race.

Others, like Beatrice Abetti of Bonita Springs, Florida, switched to Biden after Warren suspended her campaign, viewing Sanders as a general election risk. Abetti, 69, an author and former professor, said centrist Republicans she thought were critical to an Electoral College victory saw Sanders as a fringe leftist, even if she supported his policies.

“I can wait for four more years for ‘Medicare for All’ and the Green New Deal — and go with Biden — just to get Trump out of office,” Abetti said, “because that’s my number one thing.”

Her fears were specifically tied to the belief that Trump could win by highlighting a good economy against Sanders’ message of radical change. Now that the spread of the coronavirus has caused sweeping unemployment and a historic drop in stock prices, Abetti acknowledged that the political landscape had shifted.

Still, she said, “I thought Never Trump Republicans wouldn’t vote for Sanders, and more people who support Sanders would vote for Biden. So it’s with a heavy heart that I decided to back Biden.”

These voters’ willingness to unite against Sanders helped Democratic Party leaders stave off his insurgent campaign and has made Biden the all-but-certain Democratic nominee. The convergence behind Biden also highlights a critical difference between this year’s primary and what happened to the Republican Party in 2016. Four years ago, establishment Republicans were openly skeptical of Trump after his victories in early primary states, but a fractured field and split primary vote allowed him to amass an insurmountable delegate lead, reshaping the party in the process.

Sanders has explained his slide by blaming the Democratic establishment, the collection of party leaders leery of grassroots candidates promising structural change. Allies have zeroed in on the endorsements of Buttigieg and Klobuchar, whose consolidation behind Biden after the South Carolina primary left the Sanders campaign flat-footed.

“What the establishment wanted was to make sure that people coalesced around Biden and try to defeat me,” Sanders said, days after Super Tuesday, on ABC’s “This Week.” “So that’s not surprising.”

But some of Sanders’ vulnerabilities were self-inflicted, and voter interviews and exit polls from states that held their primaries in March suggest that problems existed on the ground level.

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Before Sanders’ presidential run in 2020, his campaign did not concern itself with smoothing tensions among voters who supported Clinton in 2016. He did not seek the endorsements of many party leaders, who were always unlikely to back him, but could have been swayed from being openly antagonistic to ambivalent.

As a result, after a strong finish in Iowa and wins in New Hampshire and Nevada, Sanders did not benefit from an assumed truth of presidential campaigns: that early-state victories help bring in voters from other factions. Instead, people like Lori Boerner of McLean, Virginia, said Sanders’ performance sent them searching for a candidate who could stop his rise, and after the South Carolina primary, they landed on Biden.

Boerner, 57, said she switched her support from Buttigieg to Biden the night Biden won big in South Carolina. This was before Buttigieg had dropped out and endorsed his former rival.

“I guess after New Hampshire, it became clear — Bernie’s going to win,” Boerner said. “So are we going to stop him or are we not? And then South Carolina came that Saturday, and that provided an answer and a way out.”

Most Democrats across the country do not view Sanders negatively, polling suggests. In a recent national poll from The Economist and YouGov, Sanders and Biden had nearly identical favorability ratings among Democrats, even as Biden led in presidential preferences. Sanders continues to enjoy ardent support among people who describe themselves as progressives and among younger voters across the country.

But in exit polls and interviews from states that voted in the last month, it is also clear that members of key demographics that were once skeptical of both Biden and Sanders, such as college-educated white voters, broke for the former vice president.

Sanders, who caucuses with the Democratic Party but calls himself a democratic socialist and independent, also suffered with self-identified Democrats. The Super Tuesday exit polls showed Biden trouncing Sanders among self-identified Democrats by about 30 percentage points in both Virginia and North Carolina and nearly 50 in Alabama. In Michigan, Biden won self-identified Democrats by 22 points, according to exit polls, and Sanders’ 2016 advantage among independent voters was all but wiped out.

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Progressive groups have been left to lament what could have been and some have openly questioned the outreach strategy of the Democrats’ left flank. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said recently that some on the left were too focused on “conflict.” Sean McElwee, a founder of the progressive think tank Data for Progress, said progressives must couple their desire to change the scope of the Democratic electorate with regular efforts at political persuasion.

“It cannot be a hostile takeover,” McElwee said. “We have to persuade people in the Democratic Party that our ideas are good ones and we’ll make the world a better place.”

The most stark example of Sanders’ problems with self-identified Democrats may be the Warren-to-Biden voters, people like Barbara Becker and Lisa Stone. These voters, many of whom are older Democrats and college-educated women, chose to support a candidate whose platform was a far cry from Warren’s promises of “big, structural change,” rather than a fellow progressive, Sanders — whom they admit they agree with on most policy matters.

The voters said that while they share many of Sanders’ beliefs, they reject his political style.

“Biden is and always has been a collaborative worker — one who knows how to gather and draw on colleagues’ expertise,” said Becker, a college professor in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “Sanders is a do-it-yourselfer.”

Stone, 63, an educator in Houston, said she “supported Warren because she was progressive but practical, and that’s not what Sanders is.”

Plus, Biden is, like her, a Democrat through and through. And Stone said that while she remained disappointed Warren did not perform better in Texas, the fact that the state went to Biden was some consolation.